Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘stamps’

Flowers! I feel like it has been a while since I posted something floral. Of course, it is the beginning of March so I figured it would be warm-ish out. I was wrong. It snowed yesterday and is likely to snow again on Sunday. Oh well! Flowers anyway :-p

I wanted to make a flowers-fanning-out-in-purple appearance, but the base I used has copious yellow/pink shimmer (I forgot to post the swatch before the nail art, oops!) so it kinda looks yellow-to-purple. I like it anyway but it has a very different flavor!

This came out better than I expected! It is very hard to see the teal metallic stamping polish, but the colors go nicely and I have missed geometrics 🙂

When I start a manicure I generally have an idea in mind ahead of time. With this one, I just went “i want to use that one sparkly blurple with teal flakie polish” and tried to find coordinating colors. Don’t ask me why coloring in some of the thinnest lines on one of my stamping plates was deemed a good idea, but the result is pretty cool!

I need to remember to buy more flakie polishes, they have wonderful color shifts and finishes but are not difficult to remove. Also they tend to have enough going on in them that even if you paint quickly enough to cause bubbles (because rushes are a real thing) you can’t see them!

This mani is halfway between winter and spring: winter colors but with flowers and a butterfly! Given how cold (and snowy) it continues to be, I thought that was fitting.

This is a new-to-me polish, and I love it. For some reason I am super into shimmers right now, and this is subtle, elegant, and loaded with shimmer! What you see here is three thin coats of Quixotic Polish – It Rubbed Off From Friction. This polish is one of my only purchases from Hella Handmade Creations (I usually stick to Polish Pickup). The polish is is a beautiful dark grey-mauve swimming with pink shimmer, which also has a scattering of holo glitter. That said, while I love the color of the polish, it was a little thick and hard to work with.

I then made some stamping decals/advanced stamping (aka coloring the stamp in while it is on the stamper) using silver and purple. The color combo could have been a bit better, but it wasn’t terrible. I rather wish I had used black not silver! Or maybe simply white.

In case you can’t tell, the theme this year was “slightly unusual Valentine’s day art”, so I ended up with a lot of “love” and a lot of purple :-p. The fun thing here is the purple-on-purple background stamp (you can see it best on my ring finger) and THEN the purple to white gradient stamping. Basically lots of stamps!

The base color here is Lael by Zoya, a very dark blue-leaning purple cream. As with most Zoya creams, Lael is opaque in two thin coats, and is predictably a dream to work with. I should at some point do a comparison of all my dark purple Zoya cremes (I think I own 3 very similar ones at this point) but this is the darkest in my collection! My other darkest purple Zoya Monica, looks greyed-out in comparison to the intense dark purple of Lael.

There is one more Valentines manicure in the wings for Monday (which only makes sense since my husband and I are celebrating on Sunday…at the moment I am on a day shift and he is on a nights shift so we hardly see each other!). Hope you enjoyed!

I have a degree in engineering from undergrad, and I have always loved putting little bits of electronics on my nails! There was no particular inspiration for this manicure, I just saw the image on the Matrix plate and decided I wanted to go for it 🙂

I also decided that the dark greenish-grey of Yuna would make a perfect base, especially with the scattered golden glitter! I think I was right. This mani is a bit busy but I kinda love it.

Again, a fast easy manicure! I swear I will have time to edit some of my more intricate nail art soon. I’m currently still in relax-from-step-3-but-freak-out-about-buying-a-house mode. It is a very complicated mode. Hope you enjoyed!

Simple mani today! One of my most opaque polishes (I do love A England) and two complimentary stamps. This whole manicure took 20 minutes and most of that was waiting for the burgundy polish to dry!

Honestly, I feel like I should start using white or black polish to stamp (or at least a creme finish) because in half the lights things like silver and gold look black! Oh well. It is shiny, and that makes me happy!

Not much else to say today. I have officially started what I think will end up being the most boring and paper-work intensive month of my 4-year residency. If history holds true, I will paint my nails a LOT (I started painting my nails 6 or so years ago on a very similar rotation), so that at least is something to look forward to! Hope you enjoyed 🙂

Sorry that the posts this week have been late/only a few photos, I’ve been sick! My husband it a pediatrician which means the kiddos give him lots of bugs. This time they gave him a respiratory virus and he had the courtesy to pass it on to me first time I’ve been sent home early from the hospital!

Anyway, on to nail art! This design was loosely inspired by @gabbysnailart. I love the colors but I personally wanted more glitter. Of course, the glitter is a LOT harder to remove than creme polish, but it is so sparkly! I don’t know what I thought I was doing stamping with Rosewater and then trying to color over the stamp, but here we are!

So, being honest, I don’t love this mani. I was a little pressed for time and wanted to both stamp something cool, and use the colors that the nail polish base was designed after. Since the polish is called You Look Like Seafood in honor of Tamatoa from Moana, that meant fuchsia and gold. And unfortunately, this is where I ended up!

This is three thin coats of You Look Like Seafood! by Dreamland polish. I love love LOVE this nail polish…the blue base, the pink shimmer, the flakies, the whole thing is stunning. I also really only needed two coats, I added the third just for a bit more depth. That said, I hate the brush on the polish! There was no way NOT to flood my pinky as the brush was both wide and not curved. 😦

This was also the first time I played with the Moyra Cuts plate, I have used it many times since but I was still working with how to stamp large swatches here! Luckily my polishes were quite opaque :-p. Hope you enjoyed this more than I did!

Snowflakes! More snowflakes! Snowflakes on a windy background! I decided I wanted more color so on top of Downpour (the dark blue) I dry marbled some Party Favor (teal), then stamped with Yummy (lighter blue) before stamping with silver.

Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, for some reason most of the photos came out blurry. So today there are only a few photos (although 3 does tend to be normal for me now) and I did my best to pick in-focus ones!

Maybe I should have posted something a bit more Christmas-y today, but all my manis got pushed back a day, so my official christmas mani will go up on Wednesday and holiday nails will continue through Friday. Oops! Enjoy anyway :-p

One day closer to gift-day (aka Christmas) and one more red/green manicure!

I started with red glitter, then double stamped with a white-to-green and green-to-white gradient (I don’t know why) and when that just looked messy I stamped with dark red. Despite the completely unplanned and frequently ugly nature of this manicure as it developed, I actually quite like the end result!

I just keep wearing this polish! Grey Opal might be my favorite buy from Polish Pickup Pack (its from probably a year ago at this point), because it is amazingly shimmery and flakie-y, but it still just subtle enough to totally get away with in the hospital!

I also finally used up my bottle of the original Excalibur (my go-to silver polish for just about anything), and about a year ago bought a replacement (this is the best stamping silver ever), but now it is “Renaissance” because they replaced Excalibur with some weird gold/silver flake combo which, while pretty, does not at ALL serve the purpose of the original bottle. That said, this formula is still fantastic 😀

More flowers! And yes, these were supposed to go up on Friday after Thanksgiving, and instead I was distracted by buying too much polish. And too many stamping plates (who am I kidding, no such thing!). Regardless, this makes me feel better about not posting black nails for black friday :-p

More places that I love ended up having sales than I expected, but I wasn’t too terrible? I think I ended up with 9 new polishes and 7 stamping plates. Oh well!

So this mani came out better than expected! I wanted a copperish-green and I almost missed entirely! I started of with a coat of Dragon, which is of course totally opaque in a single coat…and then decided it was too dark! So I topped it with a thin coat of a different green and then STAMPED with Dragon (and some gold). Voila!

I did have to scour a bunch of plates for actual designs though! And with the combo of green and reddish-gold I think it totally works for a quasi-thanksgiving manicure 😀

Luckily, I have part of tomorrow off, so I can at least join my husband and some of our residency friends for dinner, although I am on and overnight call on Friday into Saturday, so I have to hope that whatever awesome nail polish sales happen Friday will be ongoing until Sunday! I also need to apologize for some of the atrocious spelling and grammar at the end of Monday’s post, I should not write blog posts while exhausted. Oops! Hope you enjoyed!

I don’t know what I was aiming for with this mani! I wanted something that looked cold and windy (it snowed for the first time on Friday, and is supposed to snow again today) and it felt appropriate! I started with a grey-white shimmery base and added some stamped swirls, and then colored them in. I don’t know if this was the best idea, or if I should have gone for some creme polishes to color in the wind!

Regardless, the base color her is a new polish called Sandy by KBShimmer. It is from the August PPP. The swatches I saw made it look beautiful, which it is, but I didn’t look correctly at the layer count. This is three THICK coats, and the second time I wore it, it took 4 coats! No one has time for that. So, while I do like how it looks, I think I am relegating it to a topper. Fail.

That said, the polish is a pretty pale grey with lots of purple shimmer than shits to blue, and tons of silver holo shards. I am currently into polishes with silver shards, for whoever reason! The base is a crelly for ease of sparkle, but I know (because I own) crellys that are 2-3 coats and not 3-4 coats. This polish is not easy to use.

I have no idea where I was going with this. Two nails stamped in pink and three in brown? Over two different bases? And some other browns? This was poorly executed. However, I had just chopped my nails off so I wasn’t feeling drawn to doing something very involved on these tiny nails!

It also looks vaguely harvest-y with the brown and the nude, so I figured posting it now wouldn’t be too strange. I just need to remember to stick to stamping, at the very least, with the same color on every nail OR different colors on every nail. This mani is a bit of a color and contrast disaster!

I need to preface all of this with the fact that i don’t like this mani. my initial idea was to stamp in white over the shimmery grey base but I thought that would be too boring….in retrospect i definitely wish i had gone that route! this color combo is a bit drab.

I bought this color by KBShimer off of one of the monthly sale groups and I am honestly disappointed! The polish is a bit thick and despite that this is 3 coats and I could still see nail line. I usually trust KBShimmer, and I am aware that they have been doing a visible nail line thing for the last release or so (which is why I haven’t bought any of their polishes in a year other than this) but pooh! I am not happy. I’ll have a post with an actual polish review hopefully sometime soon. But the polish is a bit of a flop and the nail art is ALSO a bit of a flop.

Although I don’t think the photos came out that well, I LOVED wearing this mani! The dark olive green with copper and stamped with copper…and just ugh. It was so shimmery!

I don’t have much else to say about this mani really? It has double stamping, which I remain proud of, and I absolutely love Nerida Singer when I can talk myself into wearing this polish. I still own too many olive green polishes and I refuse to part with any of them!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! Friday’s post is a bit less exciting (I don’t like the mani, but I feel compelled to post my failures so others do not repeat them!) so I wanted something pretty in advance!

Happy almost-halloween! This year my husband and I ended up at two different pumpkin carving events, so now we have four pumpkins. Which is double our previous yearly count of pumpkins. I carved a set: a dragon and a castle. My husband carved a pokemon (because of course he did)…and a pumpkin. Into his pumpkin. He is an absolute dork!

Anyway, I have a bunch of fall manis lined up, but I only did one halloween manicure this year! I kinda forgot that October meant Halloween. Oops. I’ll do better next year! This year’s halloween mani is decided to stamping jack-o-lanterns. I received another plate to review from the Born Pretty Store (which was thankfully well-etched) and went to town! Unfortunately, the dark orange I used for the pumpkins is more a jelly than a cream, but I still got away with single-pass stamping on some nails (thumb and ring finger). That said, I am not surprised I had to double stamp, I need to stop using glitter polish bases! But when trying to pick a base color my head just went ‘GOOOOLD’ so here we are!

Hope you enjoyed! And I hope everyone gets lots of candy and tasty treats. If you want to pick up this pumpkin and web-decked plate, head over to the Born Pretty Store where you can find it on sale for $2.99.

Honestly, I was aiming for a completely different manicure when I started this, but my gradient came out all wrong so I ended up with this instead!

I was going for a light orange-orange-red-purple style, and as you can see it is 95% orange an 5% red with no purple at all! I tried. I really did. In retrospect, I should have known it wasn’t going to work since the purple I was trying to use is currently a dried up blobby mess. Live and learn!

I ended up deciding that all gradients (as long as the colors aren’t terrible and need to be flat-out started over) look good with some geometric patterns. I wanted something a bit more delicate so I went with this design, and of course added colors to the dots and diamonds. I think this is the third time I have done this same thing with different colors.

That’s all for today! There is a similar gradient floating around on the blog too, since I was on night float and thus was able to do slightly different nails (and keep this poor blog running)! Hope you enjoy!

Is this really pastiche? Not so much. A lot of my nail art apes that of other artists that I’ve seen and liked…this was sort of a general “I like things that are somewhat pastel and look like watercolor and flowers” and I tried to make it happen!

It turns out, of course, that I also like things that glitter. The end result of this mani was actually pretty fun, but I just kept adding more things! Lines and more lines and dots…In the end I wish I had used a lighter silver holo base for my accent nail, but I love the pink shine to Rosewater!